‘Once in a Lifetime’: The song that defines David Byrne
In the 1980s, the world needed an anti-front man for the hyper-masculine model of music performance had been well and truly exhausted, and no longer did we need a hell raising rock god to take us into the future. In fact, what we needed, without maybe realising, was David Byrne.
With his languid body movements and razor-sharp suit jackets, he cut a very different figure from what had come before. He had the physical appearance of a good guitar solo: spiralling, angular and completely elusive in his movements, yet he represented something completely different.
However, it might not have landed amidst the machismo of late 1970s New York, had the music not been so damn innovative. From the very outset, with their debut record Talking Heads ‘77, the band led by Byrne introduced the idea that their brand of new wave experimentalism had merit. The arrangements were textural, the rhythms were infectious, but more importantly for Byrne, the lyrics and vocals were intellectual.
There was a consideration to how he was presenting their music that hadn’t yet been seen. He had the sort of voice that perhaps, in the wrong hands, could have been viewed as a creative insecurity, but Byrne rather embraced it and allowed his quirk to be the vehicle with which the band could traverse into something novel.
Finally, as music had reached 1980 and looked out upon this horizon of promised innovation, it was important the frontman deliver a performance that allowed him to stake a claim as the voice of the decade. Because perhaps, without it, music in that decade could have descended into synthesised and commercial pastiche, so he delivered a song at the very start that would allow his voice to become the narrator, the guide, the steward of counterculture living.
As soon as you hear his artful baritone proclaim “You may find yourself” in the opening verse of their seminal track ‘Once in a Lifetime’, you realise that this is a sermon for the new age of alternative music. Here the world stood, on the precipice of its most excessive and commercial decade, being transfixed by a vocalist who seemingly represented the futurism everyone craved, yet he sang to them about a deep sense of fulfilment.
Explaining the heart of the song’s sentiment, Byrne explained, “We’re largely unconscious. You know, we operate half awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven’t really stopped to ask ourselves, ‘How did I get here?'”
This song perfectly showcases his understanding of modern existentialism, becoming almost like our guardian robot, custom-made to create music that cuts through the homogenised landscape we are all desperately sleepwalking towards, and his voice in this performance seems to perfectly encapsulate that.
He’s always had an interesting and offbeat delivery, but something about ‘Once in a Lifetime’ feels uniquely uncanny. It’s half melodic, half robotic, which in essence is where society found itself at that time, and sees him tapped into something that seems impenetrable, wherein lies the genius of Byrne.
